Our Founder

Over the past 15 years, Milton established the Luxury Institute as a high performance client relationship consulting firm. He is an innovator who has served over 1,0000 premium and luxury brands and has developed elite training programs for top-tier companies, including Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Intermix and Porsche to dramatically improve performance metrics in a humanistic, measurable way. These programs have been documented to help transform thousands of sales associates globally at all levels of performance into high-ethics, high-earning, high-performers.

After nearly 15 years in the luxury industry, navigating from daily executive meetings to call centers and stores, and building the most extensive network of luxury and specialty retail brand executives, Mr. Pedraza realized that while retail is a phenomenal, high-earning career for many people, even the best retail brands consistently fail to select the right people, and train them properly to be expert performers. The costs of high associate turnover and lost client relationships are staggering.

Retail Performance Academy's core principles are based on learning how to demonstrate product expertise and building lifelong client relationships using the mastery of emotional intelligence-based behaviors and metrics. The Retail Performance Academy provides select individuals with great people skills a career opportunity they cannot find elsewhere, elevates the retail profession, creates new standards of excellence, and will influence retail brands to better compensate and retain their best performers.

Milton is also an authority on customer relationship management technologies, analytics, and Big Data. Prior to founding the Retail Performance Academy and Luxury Institute, his successful career at Fortune 100 companies included executive roles at Altria, PepsiCo, Colgate, and Citigroup.

Milton developed, planned and launched the Retail Performance Academy while attending a Stanford University Business School entrepreneur leaders program in Palo Alto. He found the Stanford University program's operating principles to be the perfect business model to build the Retail Performance Academy.

Milton was born in Colombia, raised in the United States, and has lived in several countries. He has conducted business in over 100 countries, and speaks several languages.